IT WAS IN MAY that I dreamed of Isaac Bashevis Singer. I was living in the town of Taos, which in the dream was a broad avenue of cars, taxis, and flashing neon lights. I wrote Singer a letter, and he came to visit me. He rode a white horse that changed into a burgundy-colored Morris Minor. He parked in front of Grandpa George’s. I waited inside to meet him at a table with a red linen tablecloth. The room was dimly lit. As Isaac passed under the front door, a sign blinked: “Steaks as Smooth as Butter.” He sat down next to me and said, “I have a cold.”
My mouth fell open. I was afraid he’d die.
The waitress came over and he ordered chicken soup. He asked, “Could you make sure there’s a lot of breast in it?”
I said, “But Isaac, you’ve never eaten meat in your life!” Then I woke up.
Two nights later I had another dream, this time set in North Dakota. I was in a small café in a town named Upton. My grandfather drove up in a white jeep, entered the café, and sat across from me. I was eating a cucumber. I was nervous, so I talked a lot. I couldn’t control my mouth. I told him about a math test I had just taken. He turned to me and asked, “What’s four times four?” Then he looked at the menu and I understood that he was about to order a hamburger.
I yelled, “No!” and woke up, my heart beating hard. I looked around. It was morning and Gauguin was not lying next to me. I got out of bed and went outside. Gauguin was sitting on the bench out front with a plate on his lap. The plate was blue and there were two fried eggs on it with toast.
I sat down next to him and told him the whole dream and how I felt in the café. He nodded. I told him the whole dream again, this time describing more of how it had felt to be in North Dakota. Then I told him the dream I had had two nights before, the one where Singer met me in Taos. Then I just sat on the bench, looking out at the mountains like two elephants kissing.
Gauguin didn’t say a word. After a moment, he held up a forkful of egg yolk, my favorite part. He put it to my mouth and I ate it.
A week later, I told Gauguin I had to have chicken, that I had to buy a chicken at Safeway and cook it and eat it. Until that moment, I had been a vegetarian for seven years. I would eat turkey on Thanksgiving if someone else cooked it, but mostly I ate no meat. The meat department in the grocery store was essentially nonexistent to me.
Gauguin asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this.
Yes, I said.
He drove me over to Safeway in Betsy Boop and waited outside while I went in. I leaned over the cool refrigerated air and stared at cellophane packages. Yup, they still sold chickens and chicken livers and wings and thighs. I felt dizzy. The chicken was fifty-three cents a pound. I saw a row of packages in which the chickens were cut up in eighths. The chicken skins were pale yellow. I could see the raw meat underneath. My hand reached out and picked up a package. I felt its soft coldness. I dropped the package back and ran down the aisle and turned the corner. I stood in front of the saltine crackers and wept, but a voice in me urged, “Do it. Go ahead. Buy it,” and I knew the voice was not the devil. It was me. I wanted to eat meat again.
I went around the corner, picked up the package of chicken that was cut up in eighths, and stood in line to pay for it. As I waited, I chewed a stick of spearmint gum and tears rolled down my cheeks. The cashier rang up the price, put the chicken in a brown paper bag, and handed it to me after she counted out my change. I took the bag in my left hand and marched out the automatic exit door as if I were accompanied by Beethoven’s Ninth.
Gauguin started up Betsy Boop, and it jiggled loudly in idle as I settled myself into the seat with the chicken on my lap. I felt the truck’s accusation, also the magpies’ and the cottonwoods’, as we chugged along the road back to Talpa. I was Abraham bringing Isaac to the sacrificial rock. Gauguin said nothing and then he turned on the radio. It was full of static and a country singer’s voice droning on about a yellow moon. He turned it off.
When we got home, I made chicken with wine and onions. Gauguin said it smelled good, but he was going out to practice with a new band. I sat alone at the kitchen table with a thigh in wine sauce in front of me. I took a bite. I put it down. I felt slightly nauseous even before the chicken hit my stomach. There was something about cooking meat myself and eating it after seven years that really made it meat, really drove home “animal” in my mouth.
But I wanted it, and I knew it. The two dreams I had told me that. I wanted to eat meat from now on, but there was no mistake about it. An animal had died and I was biting into its flesh. I finished eating the thigh and slurped up the onions in wine sauce.
From that moment on, in a hundred ways I tried to say good-bye to Taos. “Look, Nell,” I’d say as I rode down to the Red Willow School. “See the turn, the broken fence, the fallen adobe. Take it in,” but it didn’t work. I never really believed I would leave New Mexico.